Trying to start-with-fast

Technique Critique
#17

What ever it takes! :grin: I don’t think there is anything that anyone can say to magically stop you changing your motion, you need to work on it (I’m not saying its easy).
it doesn’t matter what lick you use - maybe have a couple to give you variety. My 2 cents on it is that you ensure that the pattern is simple for the lefthand and doesn’t move around too much, taking your focus away from your picking hand. @Pepepicks66’s lick is good in that respect in that you can repeat the 1st tiny chunk in isolation and moving down tbe neck as it becomes more 2nd nature and staying on one string at a time. What I did which helped was broadly the below, but do whatever you fancy and try not too ftustrated- it will come. It looks like you have found a picking motion that might work, there are others that haven’t got that far so don’t lose heart:

  • get the tremolo going, with you fretting hand ready to play, ensuring that your tremolo is using your efficient motion.
  • Once you can smoothly play your tremolo long enough for the duration of the repeatable chunk, after a bar or 2 of the tremolo bring your fretting hand in (preferably without looking) and play a few bars of the pattern. During this your focus is on you picking hand maintaining that efficient motion - Do not worry about your fretting hand or how sloppy it might sound, this is to be expected. You only need to attempt a few bars at a time, this will conserve energy and keep the focus on getting the hands together. However, as it becomes easier/smoother, you will be able to play it repeatedly for much longer.

I’d definitely advise to do this without a metronome, because its a process of trial and error - the metronome will add a certain amount of timing pressure that again distracts you from the goal here.

Take a good handful days to attempt this and let us know how things go. Don’t make this your entire practice session otherwise you will acheive a Gollum level of obsession - not healthy. Make sure you keep it fun and inject this multiple times in between playing and jamming etc.

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#18

Thanks for posting that. The notes I got. Don’t know if I’m phrasing it exactly the same - i.e. some notes were repeated, others not - and that I may be changing. But I’m guessing that’s not the important part, right?

It’s more about giving your left hand some work to do that’s not too complicated so you can get used to the two hands working in tandem…?

#19

I like that exaggerating the trickiest stroke thing; seen that in instructional material somewhere.

#20

Ha! Exactly what Troy told me not to do;) I had suggested it myself, I think in my ‘USX work’ thread. But I getcha’ - try different things to get the two hands to make friends, right?

That’s a lot of food for though. Thanks all:)

#21

You’re exactly right, such l which is why I didn’t spend too long explaining the note choice lol. I got that up to my fastest trem speed when I first started.

Edit: it also helped me practice accentuating the pick stroke on the quarter note to coincide with the fretted note.

#22

So I took a look on the other thread at what Troy didn’t particularly like as a method (quoted below). Point number 1 is the main reason (as I read it) Troy felt that it wasn’t worth doing. This is in agreement with my suggestions above. If you go as slow as you can, you are wasting your time. To be fair to you, Troy did end saying he didn’t like the tremolo for a few bars and then jump in with the left hand - he didn’t see the point of it. It probably didn’t help him and maybe others too, but it helped me and I know others have had a similar experience too. I will say, however that it is a minor part of the process that I outlined above - if you took out the line you quoted, you still have what you need to do - its your choice - why not try both ways?

Try not to get bogged down into every detail in these forum posts, trying to find every scrap of info and to cram into your mind and playing - I’ve been there and it doesn’t help. Instead look at what people are repeating over and over and hold on to the overarching principles. I might get shot done in flames for saying this, but one of the biggest improvements to my picking has come from taking time away from the forum. I was at a similar point to you in terms of what I had to improve on, but I found that I was in the forum more than I was practicing - scouring the threads for that one golden nugget that will tell me how to fix my picking. I realised that I already knew what I needed to to, and nobody was going to be able to make my hands do what yhey needed to do. So I went and experimented my ass off, tried different methods all in one sitting and it worked. And that was without all the awesome new content that Troy and the rest are putting out now.

Keep the faith! I look forward to seeing how you get on.

#23

LOL! So true of me. I’m on the forum way more than I’m playing lately, for the reasons you state.

Okay, so in the interest of actually picking up a guitar again, and to make sure I read you… So you’re also from the get-it-going-on-one-string school, right?

#24

Hey @Yaakov! Correct me if I’m reading you wrong but I have the impression that you are looking for something like “The One True Practice Routine” to rule them all* :slight_smile:

It may help to think about it slightly differently: you and others in the forum have come up with about a million options of practice sessions that you could try.

Why not try them all? 10 minute of one thing, 10 minutes on another, plenty breaks, drink water in between etc. :smiley:

You know what you are shooting for, so you’ll be able to tell first hand what works (for you) and what doesn’t!

*poor attempt at a Rick & Morty - Lord of The Rings crossover pun

#25

Yes. Getting an efficient picking motion that is too fast a tempo to be an inefficient stringhopping one is the key. Single string chunks make it a more simple affair to deal with in my opinion and personal experience.

#26

Well, I’d say more in line with your next comment. I’ve got this hammer, but I’ve also got this screwdriver, and then there’s this saw… (I’m talking practice methods, not motions or whatever.) What do you do with each? Should I use two? Three?

I was actually thinking earlier today about what you suggest. I think I need to come up with a few different licks, and pair up each of the different approaches/practice methods we’ve been throwing around with its own lick. Sort of like, which chocolate in the box should I choose? Don’t choose - take a bite out of each one!

Thanks. Nothing’s too obvious for me to hear at this point;)

#27

Hi, @tommo… @Pepepicks66’s Stetina thing in this thread isn’t playing anymore when I click it. Can’t blame that on YT blockers;) Could it be trouble on my end or is there a way to fix it on yours?

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#28

It’s definitely not on your end, I found out that streamable only hosts for a certain timeframe before pulling it off their servers. Let me find the video and upload it again.

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#29

From memory it was something like:

play 12-0-0-0-10-0-0-0 etc. on a single string. I.e. 3 times the open string and then a note from a scale like E minor or A minor (on the high E).

I think you can make up a million of your own variations that will achieve the same goal :slight_smile:

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#30

@tommo is exactly right, the notes are really an afterthought! I stumbled on this pattern before I even saw the Stetina book: I keep bringing up the “Fight Fire with Fire” intro riff, which is exactly the same pattern but on the low E with frets 3, 2, and 1 lol.

#31

Uploaded it again!

#32

super - thanks @Pepepicks66 :slight_smile:

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#33

@Pepepicks66, back in the day, were you only doing this thing slow, the way you played it in the clip, sort of like training wheels for hand-sync? Or did you stay with it until you could do it really fast? (I could see it going either way.)

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#34

@Yaakov Honestly just fast from what I remember. I don’t think I really ever practiced things slow, normally always gunning it as fast as I could (even if the “target” speed ended up being a bit slower, which could be a mistake, but oh well).

#35

Looking at the “Why No Focus on the Left Hand?” thread, and found this…

“Paul [Gilbert] said that he already had a ‘ferocious’ legato technique before even attempting fast alternate picking, so he already had that half of his puzzle in terms of achieving speed under his belt…”

That’s exactly what I’ve been getting at in some of my recent posts - namely, that it might be too much to figure out both hands at once.

My suspicion, which this quote from Gilbert somewhat confirms (at least in his case), is that a lot of guys who finally get their fast alternate picking together have already accomplished the left hand skills that are needed to play fast. It wasn’t left and right simultaneous; it was left, then right.

Therefore?.. Granted that for a lot of people on this forum, this may be irrelevant. But for guys like me who are newer to guitar (and for the potentially many who are finding their way here via YT and now justinguitar), “start-with-fast” might be a source of unneeded frustration. Not because the theory isn’t fundamentally true, but because it presupposes a level of left-hand dexterity that newer players often lack.

The Left Hand thread mentioned above had to do with rolls, the thumb and other fine points of technique. Those are issues I don’t have yet because I’m still struggling to figure out how to just basically develop the left hand to the point where starting-with-speed is even a worthwhile discussion.

It leaves me wondering: should I just get away from single-escape altogether for now and go learn to play legato first? Or no, while that could have worked, now that I’m here at the single-escape stage, just hammer away with that?

Big fork in the road there.

#36

…Just a bit more detail. I’ve worked out a bunch of single-string patterns to work on, with the help of some folks around here (not least of all, @tommo and his sixes etude). The point is mostly to get the left hand humming, to get it caught up to the right.

Now I don’t mind sweatin’ in the woodshed, but… It feels very… “exercisey.” No other way to say it.

I know how to be a guitar “student” already, obediently banging away as the metronome clicks incessantly in the background. But my intuitive self tells me that’s not what Paul, or Troy, or anyone else did on their way to fast. (Forget my intuition - @Troy says so explicitly!)

I’ve done lots of stuff in the past guitarwise that seemed like a great idea and ended up a waste of time. Thus the confusion over whether to keep deliberately training the left hand to fret fast (as it would were I alt picking), or just go the (more natural, and typical) legato route.